Wednesday, October 31, 2007

WASHINGTON - Patrick Leahy, Senate Judiciary committee chairman, who sits on two Senate panels that oversee the State Department and the Justice Department, called the offer an example of "the amnesty administration.":

"In this administration, accountability goes by the boards. That goes equally for misconduct and for incompetence. If you get caught, they will get you immunity. If you get convicted, they will commute your sentence."

So WHAT are you doin' about it, Pat?

Subpoenas enforced? Impeachment hearings scheduled?

Or just some HOT FART MIST?

Such immunity has been routinely offered to private security contractors involved in shootings in Iraq, State Department officials said yesterday. The White House had little to say about the matter yesterday.

ROUTINELY?

White House press secretary Dana Perino dodged most questions about it at her daily briefing with reporters, referring them to the State Department:

"It is under review. Anyone who has engaged in criminal behavior will be prosecuted."

Did you see poor Dana today? She look disheveled at the press briefing.

Rough night, girl?

A second senior US official familiar with the investigation said yesterday that the immunity offer stemmed from a waiver, which Blackwater employees signed, that banned their initial statements from being used in court.

Translation: Don't worry, mercenary; If you kill anybody, you won't be held accountable.

We'll cover it up for you (and us).

It's not clear why the Diplomatic Security investigators agreed to give immunity to the bodyguards, or who authorized doing so.

Pffffftttt! We all know why! And WHO!

"U.S. Military to Supervise Iraq Security Convoys" by JOHN M. BRODER and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — Defense Robert M. Gates and military officers in Iraq insisted on the new measures “so they aren’t blindsided by contractors running in and out of their battle space and potentially causing problems.”

What? "GUNMEN" causing problems on the battlefield could be BLACKWATERS?!

O' say it isn't so, Sammy!The State Department has had repeated problems trying to rein in the nearly 845 Blackwater guards in Iraq, who have fired their weapons in 195 incidents since 2005, according to Blackwater’s count, leaving an undetermined number of Iraqis dead.

Standards have not been enforced and Blackwater guards, in particular, earned a reputation for being quick on the trigger.

But the Defense Department has had its own difficulties controlling its nearly 130,000 contractors, who handle a variety of jobs including interrogations of prisoners and transportation of fuel and ammunition. Auditors have uncovered numerous instances of cost overruns, sloppy work, theft and corruption in the tens of billions of dollars in logistics and reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

Geoff Morrell, chief Pentagon spokesman:

"We have to operate with the overall mission in mind, and that is winning the hearts and minds, the trust and confidence, of the Iraqi people.”

It's too late for that, a-hole!! You wanna win their hearts and minds?

Then ABOUT FACE and MARCH!!!!!

Congressional Democrats criticized the administration over the immunity issue, saying it underscored the government’s inability to hold contractors accountable.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who sits on two committees that oversee the State and Justice Departments:

“In this administration, accountability goes by the boards. That goes equally for misconduct and for incompetence. If you get caught, they will get you immunity. If you get convicted, they will commute your sentence.”

So WHAT are you doin' about it, Pat?

Subpoenas enforced? Impeachment hearings scheduled?

Or just some HOT FART MIST?

Sniff, sniff? Having a deja-vu, reader?

You know how an odor can do that!

Three law enforcement officials confirmed Tuesday that State Department investigators did take statements from Blackwater employees after offering them immunity, though they had no authority to do so.

Who are they, and when are they going to be FIRED?!

Immunity does not bar a criminal prosecution but is seldom granted in a case in which a criminal prosecution is likely. It is almost never granted without the approval of federal prosecutors."

"U.S. General James Jones: "Sadly, in asymmetric warfare, when you are battling an insurgency, typically the insurgents do not play by the same rules that we would like to play by."

Like what, wandering out into open fields so that AmeriKa's air annihilation devices can destroy them in one fell swoop?

Jones accuses the insurgents of hiding behind human shields, and yet here I stare at an AP report from September 2001:

"A secret office operated by the CIA was destroyed in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center... the undercover station was in 7 World Trade Center ... immediately following the attack, a CIA team searched the rubble for secret documents and intelligence reports.

The New York station used the false front of another federal organization... was a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats at the United Nations while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the CIA after returning from overseas. The agency's officers in New York often work undercover, under such guise as diplomats and business executives.

They have been deeply involved in counter-terrorism efforts in the New York area, working jointly with the FBI and other agencies.

The New York station was believed to have been the largest and most important CIA domestic station outside the Washington area."

Talk about hiding behind human shields! We are experts at it!!!!

And the CIA being "deeply involved in counter-terrorism efforts in the New York area, working jointly with the FBI and other agencies," sure flies in the face of what the government and 9/11 Commission claimed!

As a matter of fact, this whole story regarding WTC7 is explosive (pun intended) six years after 9/11!!

Look at lil' ol' Hezbollah using Democracy and Politics to try and win power.

Of course, USrael double standards dictate that any group demed inappropriate to govern is a) overtly smashed through military action, or b) refused recognition, after which covert "black ops" are used to destabilize the inappropriate group (Exhibit A: Palestine).

BEIRUT -- Emboldened by this summer's war with Israel, the radical Islamist Hezbollah party has gone on the political offensive inside Lebanon, determined either to replace or to bring down the pro-American government.

Still pro-American after we actively supplied and allowed Israel to destroy their country?

Maybe they ought to be removed.

Political leaders in Hezbollah, Lebanon's main Shi'ite Muslim movement, say the Shi'ites have proved that they command far more popular support than is reflected in their share of government posts under Lebanon's delicate power-sharing arrangement. That system, adopted under a deal that ended the nation's deadly civil war in 1990, divides power among the country's main sectarian groups -- Shi'ites, Sunni Muslims, Druze, and Christians.

Countering the lies we are told about "popularity" and "support"

Now, Hezbollah and an allied Christian political party led by General Michel Aoun are demanding a government reshuffle that would give them more positions -- and would in effect give Hezbollah veto power over any legislation. They have threatened to boycott the government or try to bring it down through strikes and street demonstrations if they don't get more posts.

Aoun sure is an unlikely bedfellow! And they are still there, one year later!

Hezbollah's demand threatens a sectarian power-sharing arrangement that has averted civil war for 15 years, doling out positions of power to different groups without regard to their real share of voter support.

So Bush is supporting an undemocratic government, 'eh?

US officials, the Lebanese government, and Israel say that by gaining veto power, Hezbollah would paralyze the government, extend Syrian influence over Lebanon, and ruin Lebanon's prospects to rebuild. And if Hezbollah -- which the United States lists as a terrorist group -- were to expand its share of government power, the United States could find itself unable to work with the Lebanese authorities, since it boycotts all Hezbollah officials.

The Lebanese government is an ally of USrael? Then it deserves the boot!

Pro-Western political minorities, who together represent less than half the population, control a veto-proof supermajority of government power under the 1990 accord that ended the civil war.

And the papers told me that was dominance.

Hezbollah says it will wield political tools -- such as withdrawing from the government, along with public demonstrations and strikes -- to prolong the crisis until the government accedes to its wishes.

Hezbollah has spent years building support in the southern villages and poor suburbs where the Shi'ite population lives. The movement maintains that Lebanon's Shi'ite population, now approaching nearly 50 percent, has grown faster than others.

Two months after a war that left Lebanon's infrastructure in shambles and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Hezbollah's leadership wants to cash in on a conflict that it sees as a political and military victory.

Oh! Hezbollah is going to "cash in" on the conflict!

Of course, OUR WARS are only committed after careful thought and deliberation, and NO ONE EVER PROFITS on our side.

Hezbollah benefited because:

Israel failed to destroy Hezbollah militarily. Then, the popularity of Hezbollah's charismatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, soared in Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world, as he became an icon for currents of Islamist, anti-Israeli, anti-Western, and Arab nationalist sentiment.

Shi'ites continued to fervently support Hezbollah. A month after the war, Nasrallah staged a "victory" rally in Beirut, drawing as many as 1 million supporters in a show of strength not lost on Hezbollah's political rivals inside Lebanon.... despite the heavy casualties and displacement.

Or because of it?

Even Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat says no politician can claim Lebanon doesn't need Hezbollah's armed resistance -- even those members of the government like himself who believe only the Lebanese state should have an army.

Fatfat is at the center of the first direct postwar clash between Hezbollah and the government. His ministry's Internal Security Forces, a kind of police commando unit, fatally shot a Shi'ite demonstrator in the Hezbollah stronghold of southern Beirut on Oct. 6. The government was trying to crack down on illegal construction in the Shi'ite suburb.

But the outcry that followed stoked a power struggle between the government and Hezbollah, with members of the Shi'ite group demanding that government police leave their part of the city.

And what do you think cracking "down on illegal construction in the Shi'ite suburb," is?

TRYING to STOP HEZBOLLAH from REBUILDING,that's what!

No wonder Hezbollah is popular and the Lebaneses hate the government lackeys!

That blubbering coward Sionara, who wept as Hezbollah defended Lebanon against Israel!

"It was definitely a challenge to the authority of the police," Fatfat said. His security forces withdrew briefly, but within days of the skirmish, they were patrolling in the Shi'ite suburbs again, fully armed.

I'll bet that makes the Shia feel safer!

Fatfat said Hezbollah is trying to seize on its postwar prestige and mobilize popular anger among its supporters "to see what they can gain in internal politics."

"This kind of discourse is very dangerous, because it's based on pressure from the street," he said.

Yeah, and there is nothing more dangerous to democracy than the street!

How popular is Hezbollah, anyway?

Hezbollah has managed to keep the support of the other major Shi'ite political organization, Amal, and has found a surprising Christian ally, Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement.

The Christian leader and retired army general has rallied his followers in the capital with an outpouring of anger at the government, which includes ministers from much smaller and less popular Christian political parties than Aoun's.

Aoun, a sworn enemy of Syria, and Nasrallah, whose movement openly accepts Syria's military and financial support, formed an unusual political union in February. Both leaders believe Lebanon's electoral rules unfairly depress their share of power in the national government, and both rail against government corruption and nepotism.

Just a year ago, Aoun was a loud proponent of disarming Hezbollah. But now, shut out of power by the ruling coalition, he has accorded broader legitimacy to Hezbollah by giving it a cross-sectarian base, in exchange for Shi'ite support for his November 2007 presidential bid.

The government, Aoun said in an interview, has "bankrupted the country, and runs it like a mafia."

"They are puppets," Aoun said. "They cannot resist popular pressure and strikes, because they aren't supported by the people."

Talk about TURNING the TABLES! Bush really is a uniter!

Look at Bush bringing enemies who hate each other together!

But don't worry, Georgie. Here's your man:

An increasingly weak and isolated government has reacted defensively to the Hezbollah-Aoun offensive. Saad Hariri, the son of slain former prime minister Rafik Hariri, heads the government's parliamentary bloc and is the unofficial leader of the government forces. After a war that he didn't want, he has been reduced to praising Hezbollah's "resistance" and describing the battle in southern Lebanon as a "victory."

Hariri, a Sunni, invited mayors from Shi'ite towns in the south to a recent Ramadan breakfast at his palatial Beirut mansion, to woo some of the Shi'ite politicians to support the government. In response to a small-town mayor at the breakfast who asked worriedly about the prospects for renewed civil war, Hariri called on young hotheads to "calm down."

"I don't want this country to fracture," Hariri said. Of course not! Not when you are living in a "palatial Beirut mansion" as the "leader of the government forces."

So it is your Interior Ministry that is running death squads, 'eh?

Backed by USrael?

Like many in the government, Hariri said the solution lies in resuming the "National Dialogue," a series of meetings among all political factions to resolve thorny issues, including a new voting law and the question of how to disarm Hezbollah. That process had deadlocked when war broke out July 12, and Hezbollah officials dismiss the prospects for a new dialogue until their demand for more power is met.

"If we want to block the government, we could block it now," said Nawar El Sahili, a Hezbollah representative in parliament. "We insist we must change this government peacefully. We prefer not to go to the ground and have demonstrations. In the end, we may be obliged to go to the street. Peacefully, of course."

Well, that last bit must be a lie.

No way those insane, bloodthirsty Muslims who hate us more than they love their kids could ever possibly behave peacefully.

Aldous Huxley's inspired 1954 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe described by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all bonds, all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand - in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched infinite rawness.

Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated. Who cares, right?

It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time, I would like to provide just a little background on the handling of information in this country. Once the basic principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given story in today's news.

If everybody believes something, it's probably wrong. We call that

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

In America, conventional wisdom that has mass acceptance is usually contrived: somebody paid for it. Examples:

Pharmaceuticals restore healthVaccination brings immunityThe cure for cancer is just around the cornerMenopause is a disease conditionWhen a child is sick, he needs immediate antibioticsWhen a child has a fever he needs TylenolHospitals are safe and clean.America has the best health care in the world.Americans have the best health in the world.Milk is a good source of calcium.You never outgrow your need for milk.Vitamin C is ascorbic acid.Aspirin prevents heart attacks.Heart drugs improve the heart.Back and neck pain are the only reasons for spinal adjustment.No child can get into school without being vaccinated.The FDA thoroughly tests all drugs before they go on the market.Pregnancy is a serious medical conditionInfancy is a serious medical conditionChemotherapy and radiation are effective cures for cancerWhen your child is diagnosed with an ear infection, antibiotics should be given immediately 'just in case'Ear tubes are for the good of the child.Estrogen drugs prevent osteoporosis after menopause.Pediatricians are the most highly trained of al medical specialists.The purpose of the health care industry is health.HIV is the cause of AIDS.AZT is the cure.Without vaccines, infectious diseases will returnFluoride in the city water protects your teethFlu shots prevent the flu.Vaccines are thoroughly tested before being placed on the Mandated Schedule.Doctors are certain that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any possible risks.There is a terrorist threat in the US.There is a bioterrorist threat in the US.The NASDAQ is a natural market controlled by supply and demand.Chronic pain is a natural consequence of aging.Soy is your healthiest source of protein.Insulin shots cure diabetes.After we take out your gall bladder you can eat anything you wantAllergy medicine will cure allergies.An airliner can be flown with professional precision by a group of crazed amateurs into a 100-storey building and can cause that building to collapse on its own footprint. Twice.The Iraquis blew up the World Trade Center.

This is a list of illusions, that have cost billions to conjure up. Did you ever wonder why most people in this country generally accept most of the above statements?

PROGRAMMING THE VIEWER

Even the most undiscriminating viewer may suspect that TV newsreaders and news articles are not telling us the whole story. The slightly more lucid may have begun to glimpse the calculated intent of standard news content and are wondering about the reliability and accuracy of the way events are presented. For the very few who take time to research beneath the surface of the daily programming and who are still capable of independent thought, a somewhat darker picture begins to emerge. These may perceive bits of evidence of the profoundly technical science behind much of what is served up in mass media.

Events taking place in today's world are enormously complex. An impossibly convoluted tangle of interrelated and unrelated occurrences happens simultaneously, often in dynamic conflict. To even acknowledge this complexity contradicts a fundamental axiom of media science: Keep It Simple.

In real life, events don't take place in black and white, but in a thousand shades of grey. Just discovering the actual facts and events as they transpire is difficult enough. The river is different each time we step into it. By the time a reasonable understanding of an event has been apprehended, new events have already made that interpretation obsolete. And this is not even adding historical, social, or political elements into the mix, which are necessary for interpretation of events. Popular media gives up long before this level of analysis.

Media stories cover only the tiniest fraction of actual events, but stupidly claim to be summarizing "all the news."

The final goal of media is to create a following of docile, unquestioning consumers. To that end, three primary tools have historically been employed:

deceitdissimulationdistraction

Over time, the sophistication of these tools of propaganda has evolved to a very structured science, taking its cues in an unbroken line from principles laid down by the Father of Spin himself, Edward L Bernays, over a century ago, as we will see.

Let's look at each tool very briefly:

DECEIT

Deliberate misrepresentation of fact has always been the privilege of the directors of mass media. Their agents - the PR industry - cannot afford random objective journalism interpreting events as they actually take place. This would be much too confusing for the average consumer, who has been spoonfed his opinions since the day he was born. No, we can't have that. In all the confusion the viewer might get the idea that he is supposed to make up his own mind about the significance of some event or other. The end product of good media is single-mindedness. Confusion and individual interpretation of events do not foster the homogenized, one-dimensional lemming outlook.

For this reason, events must have a spin put on them - an interpretation, a frame of reference. Subtleties are omitted; all that is presented is the bottom line. The minute that decision is made - what spin to put on a story - we have left the world of reporting and entered the world of propaganda. By definition, propaganda replaces faithful reporting with deceitful reporting.

Here's an obvious example: the absurd and unremitting allegations of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as a rationale for the invasion of Iraq. Of course none were ever found, but that is irrelevant. We weren't really looking for any weapons - but the deceit served its purpose - get us in there. Later the ruse can be abandoned and forgotten; its usefulness is over. And nobody will notice. Characterization of Saddam as a murderous tyrant was decided to be an insufficient excuse for invading a sovereign nation. After all, there are literally dozens of murderous tyrants the world over, going their merry ways. We can't be expected to police all of them.

So it was decided that the murderous tyrant thing, though good, was not enough. To whip a sleeping people into war consciousness has historically involved one additional prerequisite: threat. Saddam must therefore be not only a baby-killing maniac; he must be a threat to the rest of the world, especially America. Why? Because he has weapons of mass destruction. For almost two years, this myth was assiduously programmed into the lowest common denominator of awareness which Americans substitute for consciousness. Even though the myth has now been openly dismissed by the Regime itself, the majority of us still believe it.

Hitler used the exact same tack with the Czechs and Poles at the beginning of his rampage. These peaceful peoples were not portrayed as an easy mark for the German war machine - no, they were a threat to the Fatherland itself. Just like Albania in the Dustin Hoffman movie. And threats must be removed by all available force.

With Iraq, the fact that UN inspectors never came up with any of these dread weapons before Saddam was captured - this fact was never mentioned again. That one phrase - WMD WMD WMD - repeated ad nauseam month after month had served its purpose - whip the people into war mode. It didn't have to be true; it just had to work. A staggering indicator of how low the general awareness had sunk is that this mantra continued to be used as our license to invade Iraq long after our initial assault. If Saddam had any such weapons, probably a good time to trot them out would be when a foreign country is moving in, wouldn't you say?

No weapons were ever found, nor will they be. So confident was the PR machine in the general inattention to detail commonly exhibited by the comatose American people that they didn't even find it necessary to plant a few mass weapons in order to justify the invasion. It was almost insulting.

So we see that a little deceit goes a long way. All it takes is repetition. Lay the groundwork and the people will buy anything. After that just ride it out until they seem doubtful again. Then onto the next deceit.

DISSIMULATION

A second tool that is commonly used to create mass intellectual torpor is dissimulation. Dissimulation simply means to pretend not to be something you are. Like some insects who can disguise themselves as leaves or twigs, pretending not to be insects. Or bureaucrats who pretend not to be acting in their own interest, but rather in the public interest. To pretend not to be what you are.

Whether it's the Bush league in Iraq or Hitler in Germany, aggressors do not present themselves as marauding invaders initiating hostilities, but instead as defenders against external threats.

Freedom-annihilating edicts like the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act - currently the law of the land - do not represent themselves as the negation of every principle the Founding Fathers laid down, or as shaky pretexts for the Takers to further loot the country, but rather as public services, benevolent and necessary new rules to ensure our SECURITY against various imagined enemies. To pretend to be what you are not: dissimulation.

Other obvious examples of dissimulation we see today include:

pretending like the world's oil will not be gone in 35 yearspretending like more and more government will not further stifle an already struggling economypretending like programs favoring "minorities" are not just another form of racismpretending like drug laws are necessary for national securitypretending like passing more and more laws every year is not geared ultimately for the advancement of the law enforcement, security, and prison industriespretending there is a bioterrorist threat in the US todaypretending there is a terrorist threat in the US todaypretending the Bush regime has not benefited from every program that came out of 9/11

To pretend to be what you are not: dissimulation.

DISTRACTION

A third tool necessary to media in order to keep the public from thinking too much is distraction. Bread and circuses worked for Caesar in old Rome. The people need to be kept quiet while the small group in power carries out its agenda, which always involves fortifying its own position.

All actions of the present Reich since 9/11 may be explained by plugging in one of four beneficiaries:

OilPharmaceuticalsWar gearSecurity systems

Every act, every political event, every public statement of the present administration has promoted one or more of these huge sectors. More oil, more drugs, more weapons, more security.

But the people mustn't be allowed to notice things like that. So they must be smokescreened by other stuff , blatant obvious stuff which is really easy to understand and which they think has a greater bearing on their day to day life. A classic axiom of propaganda is that people shouldn't be allowed to think too much about what the government is doing in their name. After all, there's more to life than politics, right? So while the power group has its cozy little war going on, the people need to have their attention diverted.

All the strong men of history would have given their eyeteeth to have at their disposal the number and types of distractions available to today's regimes:

- TV sports, its orchestrated frenzy and spectacle

- Super Sunday

- an endless succession of unspeakably boring, inane movies, short on plot, long on CGI

- the wanton sexless flash of MTV with its uninspired lack of talent, a study in split second phony images

- colossally dull TV programs which serve the secondary purpose of instilling proper robot attitudes into people who have little other instruction in life values

- the artistic Mojave of modern music, with its soulless cyber-droning, a constant quest for the nadir of reptilian brain stimulation, devoid of lyrical competence, instrumental proficiency, or passion

- the ever-retreating promise of financial success, switched now to the trappings and toys that suggest success, available to anyone with a credit card

- organized superstitions of all varieties, with their requisite pseudo-spiritual trappings

- the constant dramatization of crimes and "issues" throughout the world whose collective goal is the humble and grateful acknowledgement of "how good we've really got it"

- dwelling for months on the minutiae of unsupported allegations of impropriety, preferably sexual, of a celebrity personality

With these noisy, banal distractions the forces promoting the general decline in intelligence and awareness jubilantly engulf us on all sides. Media science holds the advantage: as people get dumber and dumber year by year it gets easier and easier to keep them dumb. The only challenge is that their threshold keeps getting lower. So in order to keep their attention, messages have to become more obvious and blatant, taking nothing for granted.

Here are some indicators of our declining intelligence:

- flagrant errors of grammar and spelling rampant in advertising, which go unnoticed

- declining SAT scores and the arbitrary resetting of normals, which has occurred at least twice in the past 8 years, in order to cover up the how dumb our kids are really getting

- increased volume and decreased speed of the voices of newsreaders on radio and TV

- the limited vocabulary and cliched speech allowed in radio programs; the obvious lack of education and requisite pedestrian mentality required of the corporate simians who are featured on radio

- increasing illiteracy of high school graduates, both written and spoken

- the unwritten policy requiring school teachers, especially math and English teachers, to pass students who have failing marks, especially if they're a certain race or other, so that the school won't "look bad"

- decreasing requirements for masters theses and PhD dissertations in both length and content

- the speed at which images on TV are flashed, giving the viewer barely enough time to recognize which sledgehammer idea they are referring to before the next one appears, about 2 seconds later. That way there is no possible way the brain can follow a train of thought in any kind of depth. From childhood the brain learns that it is not to be tasked with understanding abstractions or concepts of any subtlety from the information presented. All the brain has to do is react to the incessant bombardment of fragmented ADD-generating visual stimuli without trying to derive sense or logic from it. This is why TV should be watched only with the sound off, since it has generally the same educational value as a lava lamp.

- the enormous proportion of time spent by TV channels telling the viewer what will be shown in the future, leaving no time for actually delivering what they have already endlessly promised in the recent past, which should be airing at the present moment.

- newspaper articles that are not written by reporters but that are scientifically crafted phrase by canny phrase by the PR industry and placed into the columns of syndication in the guise of 'hard news'

- Jerky, clumsy news clips, loaded with coarse innuendo and nonsequitur, ridiculously brief: most news clips evoke only the most superficial suggestion of events which may or may not have transpired, resulting generally in the transfer of no information

- the downward spiral of the level of ordinary conversations, which are commonly just exercises in stringing together random cliché s from the very finite stock of endlessly repeated homogeneous bytes. It's as though we're only allowed to have 50 thoughts, and most conversation is just linking these 50 programmed audio clips together in a different order. Listen to what people say, the way they say it. Or worse yet, visit a chat room.

PUT-UP JOB

Now let's imagine for a moment that 9/11 was a put-up job engineered for the sole purpose of cementing the current regime into power and frightening the bovine populace into surrendering even more of what little freedom they have left. Hypothetical situation of course, just work with me a little here. Imagine there never were any dissident crazed terrorists representing Osama or Saddam, but instead a highly disciplined though slightly whacked-out team of military fanatics, programmed somehow to think they were doing something valuable for some faction or other. But carefully trained by agents from on high. A put-up job, from the inside.

So then imagine that all the violence and stress perpetrated on the collective American psyche since 9/11 about war, bioterrorism, and security has all been completely unnecessary. And that all the billions of dollars of extra security and wasted time in airports and borders was also totally unnecessary because there never were any terrorists, except those on Capitol Hill. And all the shrill media articles and "stories" that support the few underlying events have been unnecessary, their prime purpose being self promotion. Think how much our quality of life has suffered, and how it will never be the same. What if all this stress has been totally unnecessary?

Many of our best people have come to precisely these conclusions. Once you get past the initial hurdle of being able to consider the unthinkable possibility that a regime could be so obsessed with gaining political advantage that they would actually blow up 3000 of our own people, the rest falls into place. Over the top? Not such a stretch really when you compare the thousands that have been sacrificed to the whims of other murderous tyrants the world over throughout all of recorded history. Exactly how is it impossible?

WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW?

When it comes to a discussion of what's going on in the world, the honest individual must admit that he has almost no idea. When was the last time George Bush invited you into the Green Room for a private chat with Cheney and Ashcroft about the future of big oil? When did Bill Gates last invite you up to his Redmond digs for a wine and cheese brainstorming session about the next Big Thing? Or when did your neighbor who lives three houses away from you call you up to tell you about the unfulfilled plans of his father who just found out he's dying of cancer? How many life stories of the world's six billion people do you know anything about? This is to say nothing of fluid events which are coming in and out of existence every day between the nations of the world. What do you really know about what is really going on?

Seems like much more effort is spent covering up and packaging actual events that are taking place than in trying to accurately report and evaluate them. These are questions of epistemology - what can we know? The answer is - very little, if our only source of information is the superficial everyday media. The few people who buy books don't read them. Passive absorption of pre-interpreted already-figured-out data is the preferred method

HOW IT ALL GOT STARTED

But wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's back up a minute. In their book Trust Us We're Experts, Stauber and Rampton pull together some compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in America. They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the last century, highlighting the work of guys like Edward L. Bernays, the Father of Spin.

From his own amazing 1928 chronicle Propaganda, we learn how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud, and applied them to the emerging science of mass persuasion. The only difference was that instead of using these principles to uncover hidden themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays studied these same ideas in order to learn how to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.

THE FATHER OF SPIN

Edward L. Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant force for another 40 years after that. (Tye) During that time, Bernays took on hundreds of diverse assignments to create a public perception about some idea or product. A few examples:

As a neophyte with the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays' first assignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to "Make the World Safe for Democracy." (Ewen) We've seen this phrase used in every war, police action, and spoiling raid we've carried out since that time.

A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes. In organizing the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, Bernays showed himself as a force to be reckoned with. He organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in which suffragettes marched in the parade smoking cigarettes as a mark of women's liberation. After that one event, women would be able to feel secure about destroying their own lungs in public, the same way that men have always done.

Bernays popularized the idea of bacon for breakfast.

Bernays also set up the liaison between the tobacco industry and the American Medical Association that lasted for nearly 50 years. His ad campaign proved to all and sundry that cigarettes were beneficial to health. Just look at ads in old issues of Life, Look, Time or Journal of the American Medical Association from the 40s and 50s in which doctors are recommending this or that brand of cigarettes as promoting healthful digestion, or whatever.

During the next several decades Bernays and his colleagues evolved the principles by which masses of people could be generally swayed through messages repeated over and over, hundreds of times per week.

Once the economic power of media became apparent, other countries of the world rushed to follow our lead. But Bernays remained the gold standard. He was the source to whom the new PR leaders across the world would always defer. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, closely studied the principles of Edward Bernays when Goebbels was developing the popular rationale he would use to convince the Germans that in order to purify their race they had to kill 6 million of the impure. (Stauber)

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

As he saw it, Bernay's job was to reframe an issue; to create a desired image that would put a particular product or concept in a desirable light. He never saw himself as a master hoodwinker, but rather as a beneficent servant of humanity, providing a valuable service. Bernays described the public as a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people "susceptible to leadership." Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to "control the masses without their knowing it." The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.

Stauber describes Bernays' rationale like this:

"the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in a democratic society."

- Trust Us, p 42

These early mass persuaders postured themselves as performing a moral service for humanity in general. Democracy was too good for people; they needed to be told what to think, because they were incapable of rational thought by themselves.

Here's a paragraph from Bernays' Propaganda:

"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

A tad different from Thomas Jefferson's view on the subject:

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

Inform their discretion. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the necessary insight into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred task. And luckily, he saw himself as one of that elect.

HERE COMES THE MONEY

Once the possibilities of applying Freudian psychology to mass media were glimpsed, Bernays soon had more corporate clients than he could handle. Global corporations fell all over themselves courting the new Image Makers. There were dozens of goods and services and ideas to be sold to a susceptible public. Over the years, these players have had the money to make their images happen. A few examples:

Though world-famous within the PR industry, these are names we don't know, and for good reason. The best PR goes unnoticed. For decades they have created the opinions that most of us were raised with, on virtually any issue which has the remotest commercial value, including:

pharmaceutical drugsvaccinesmedicine as a professionalternative medicinefluoridation of city waterchlorinehousehold cleaning productstobaccodioxinglobal warmingleaded gasolinecancer research and treatmentpollution of the oceansforests and lumberimages of celebrities, including damage controlcrisis and disaster managementgenetically modified foodsaspartamefood additives; processed foodsdental amalgamsautism

LESSON #1

Bernays learned early on that the most effective way to create credibility for a product or an image was by "independent third-party" endorsement. For example, if General Motors were to come out and say that global warming is a hoax thought up by some liberal tree-huggers, people would suspect GM's motives, since GM's fortune is made by selling automobiles. If however some independent research institute with a very credible sounding name like the Global Climate Coalition comes out with a scientific report that says global warming is really a fiction, people begin to get confused and to have doubts about the original issue.

So that's exactly what Bernays did. With a policy inspired by genius, he set up "more institutes and foundations than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined." (Stauber p 45) Quietly financed by the industries whose products were being evaluated, these "independent" research agencies would churn out "scientific" studies and press materials that could create any image their handlers wanted. Such front groups are given high-sounding names like:

As Stauber explains, these organizations and hundreds of others like them are front groups whose sole mission is to advance the image of the global corporations who fund them, like those -listed on page 2 above. This is accomplished in part by an endless stream of 'press releases' announcing "breakthrough" research to every radio station and newspaper in the country. (Robbins) Many of these canned reports read like straight news, and indeed are purposely molded in the news format. This saves journalists the trouble of researching the subjects on their own, especially on topics about which they know very little. Entire sections of the release or in the case of video news releases, the whole thing can be just lifted intact, with no editing, given the byline of the reporter or newspaper or TV station - and voilá¡ Instant news - copy and paste. Written by corporate PR firms.

Does this really happen? Every single day, since the 1920s when the idea of the News Release was first invented by Ivy Lee. (Stauber, p 22) Sometimes as many as half the stories appearing in an issue of the Wall St. Journal are based solely on such PR press releases.. (22) These types of stories are mixed right in with legitimately researched stories. Unless you have done the research yourself, you won't be able to tell the difference. So when we see new "research" being cited, we should always first suspect that the source is another industry-backed front group. A common tip-off is the word "breakthrough."

THE LANGUAGE OF SPIN

As 1920s spin pioneers like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays gained more experience, they began to formulate rules and guidelines for creating public opinion. They learned quickly that mob psychology must focus on emotion, not facts. Since the mob is incapable of rational thought, motivation must be based not on logic but on presentation. Here are some of the axioms of the new science of PR:

technology is a religion unto itselfif people are incapable of rational thought, real democracy is dangerousimportant decisions should be left to expertswhen reframing issues, stay away from substance; create imagesnever state a clearly demonstrable lie

Words are very carefully chosen for their emotional impact. Here's an example. A front group called the International Food Information Council handles the public's natural aversion to genetically modified foods. Trigger words are repeated all through the text. Now in the case of GM foods, the public is instinctively afraid of these experimental new creations which have suddenly popped up on our grocery shelves and which are said to have DNA alterations. The IFIC wants to reassure the public of the safety of GM foods. So it avoids words like:

It's just basic Freudian/Tony Robbins word association. The fact that GM foods are not hybrids that have been subjected to the slow and careful scientific methods of real cross-breeding doesn't really matter. This is pseudoscience, not science. Form is everything and substance just a passing myth. (Trevanian)

Who do you think funds the International Food Information Council? Take a wild guess. Right - Monsanto, DuPont, Frito-Lay, Coca Cola, Nutrasweet - those in a position to make fortunes from GM foods. (Stauber p 20)

CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD PROPAGANDA

As the science of mass control evolved, PR firms developed further guidelines for effective copy. Here are some of the gems:

dehumanize the attacked party by labeling and name callingspeak in glittering generalities using emotionally positive wordswhen covering something up, don't use plain English; stall for time; distractget endorsements from celebrities, churches, sports figures, street people - anyone who has no expertise in the subject at handthe 'plain folks' ruse: us billionaires are just like youwhen minimizing outrage, don't say anything memorablewhen minimizing outrage, point out the benefits of what just happenedwhen minimizing outrage, avoid moral issues

Keep this list. Start watching for these techniques. Not hard to find - look at today's paper or tonight's TV news. See what they're doing; these guys are good!

SCIENCE FOR HIRE

PR firms have become very sophisticated in the preparation of news releases. They have learned how to attach the names of famous scientists to research that those scientists have not even looked at. (Stauber, p 201) It's a common practice. In this way, the editors of newspapers and TV news shows are themselves often unaware that an individual release is a total PR fabrication. Or at least they have "deniability," right?

Stauber tells the amazing story of how leaded gas came into the picture. In 1922, General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline gave cars more horsepower. When there was some concern about safety, GM paid the Bureau of Mines to do some fake "testing" and publish spurious research that 'proved' that inhalation of lead was harmless. Enter Charles Kettering.

Founder of the world famous Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute for medical research, Charles Kettering also happened to be an executive with General Motors. By some strange coincidence, we soon have Sloan-Kettering issuing reports stating that lead occurs naturally in the body and that the body has a way of eliminating low level exposure. Through its association with The Industrial Hygiene Foundation and PR giant Hill & Knowlton, Sloane-Kettering opposed all anti-lead research for years. (Stauber p 92). Without organized scientific opposition, for the next 60 years more and more gasoline became leaded, until by the 1970s, 90% or our gasoline was leaded.

Finally it became too obvious to hide that lead was a major carcinogen, which they knew all along, and leaded gas was phased out in the late 1980s. But during those 60 years, it is estimated that some 30 million tons of lead were released in vapor form onto American streets and highways. 30 million tons. (Stauber)

That is PR, my friends.

JUNK SCIENCE

In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The book was Galileo's Revenge and the term was junk science . Huber's absurd thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress. Anything else should be thought of as junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber's book was supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.

Huber's book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because they do not yet know what the truth is.

True scientific method goes like this:

1. form a hypothesis2. make predictions for that hypothesis3. test the predictions4. reject or revise the hypothesis based on the research findings

Boston University scientist Dr. David Ozonoff explains that ideas in science are themselves like "living organisms, that must be nourished, supported, and cultivated with resources for making them grow and flourish." (Stauber p 205) Great ideas that don't get this financial support because the commercial angles are not immediately obvious - these ideas wither and die.

Another way you can often distinguish real science from phony is that real science points out flaws in its own research. Phony science pretends there were no flaws.

THE REAL JUNK SCIENCE

Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science. Corporate sponsored research, whether it's in the area of drugs, GM foods, or chemistry begins with predetermined conclusions. It is the job of the scientists then to prove that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit. If a drug company is spending 10 million dollars on a research project to prove the viability of some new drug, and the preliminary results start coming back about the dangers of that drug, what happens? Right. No more funding. The well dries up. What is being promoted under such a system? Science? Or rather Entrenched Medical Error?"

Stauber documents the increasing amount of corporate sponsorship of university research. (206) This has nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge. Scientists lament that research has become just another commodity, something bought and sold. (Crossen)

THE TWO MAIN TARGETS OF "SOUND SCIENCE"

It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR today opposes any research that seeks to protect

public healththe environment

It's a funny thing that most of the time when we see the phrase "junk science," it is in a context of defending something that threatens either the environment or our health. This makes sense when one realizes that money changes hands only by selling the illusion of health and the illusion of environmental protection or the illusion of health. True public health and real preservation of the earth's environment have very low market value.

Stauber thinks it ironic that industry's self-proclaimed debunkers of junk science are usually non-scientists themselves. (255) Here again they can do this because the issue is not science, but the creation of images.

THE LANGUAGE OF ATTACK

When PR firms attack legitimate environmental groups and alternative medicine people, they again use special words which will carry an emotional punch:

The next time you are reading a newspaper article about an environmental or health issue, note how the author shows bias by using the above terms. This is the result of very specialized training.

Another standard PR tactic is to use the rhetoric of the environmentalists themselves to defend a dangerous and untested product that poses an actual threat to the environment. This we see constantly in the PR smokescreen that surrounds genetically modified foods. They talk about how GM foods are necessary to grow more food and to end world hunger, when the reality is that GM foods actually have lower yields per acre than natural crops. (Stauber p 173) The grand design sort of comes into focus once you realize that almost all GM foods have been created by the sellers of herbicides and pesticides so that those plants can withstand greater amounts of herbicides and pesticides. (see The Magic Bean)

THE MIRAGE OF PEER REVIEW

Publish or perish is the classic dilemma of every research scientist. That means whoever expects funding for the next research project had better get the current research paper published in the best scientific journals. And we all know that the best scientific journals, like JAMA, New England Journal, British Medical Journal, etc. are peer-reviewed. Peer review means that any articles which actually get published, between all those full color drug ads and pharmaceutical centerfolds, have been reviewed and accepted by some really smart guys with a lot of credentials. The assumption is, if the article made it past peer review, the data and the conclusions of the research study have been thoroughly checked out and bear some resemblance to physical reality.

But there are a few problems with this hot little set up. First off, money.

Even though prestigious venerable medical journals pretend to be so objective and scientific and incorruptible, the reality is that they face the same type of being called to account that all glossy magazines must confront: don't antagonize your advertisers. Those full-page drug ads in the best journals cost millions, Jack. How long will a pharmaceutical company pay for ad space in a magazine that prints some very sound scientific research paper that attacks the safety of the drug in the centerfold? Think about it. The editors may lack moral fibre, but they aren't stupid.

Another problem is the conflict of interest thing. There's a formal requirement for all medical journals that any financial ties between an author and a product manufacturer be disclosed in the article. In practice, it never happens. A study done in 1997 of 142 medical journals did not find even one such disclosure. (Wall St. Journal, 2 Feb 99)

A 1998 study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that 96% of peer reviewed articles had financial ties to the drug they were studying. (Stelfox, 1998) Big shock, huh? Any disclosures? Yeah, right. This study should be pointed out whenever somebody starts getting too pompous about the objectivity of peer review, like they often do.

Then there's the outright purchase of space. A drug company may simply pay $100,000 to a journal to have a favorable article printed. (Stauber, p 204)

Fraud in peer review journals is nothing new. In 1987, the New England Journal ran an article that followed the research of R. Slutsky MD over a seven year period. During that time, Dr. Slutsky had published 137 articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals. NEJM found that in at least 60 of these 137, there was evidence of major scientific fraud and misrepresentation, including:

reporting data for experiments that were never donereporting measurements that were never madereporting statistical analyses that were never doneo Engler

Dean Black PhD, describes what he the calls the Babel Effectthat results when this very common and frequently undetected scientific fraud in peer-reviewed journals is quoted by other researchers, who are in turn re-quoted by still others, and so on.

Want to see something that sort of re-frames this whole discussion? Check out the McDonald's ads which routinely appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Then keep in mind that this is the same publication that for almost 50 years ran cigarette ads proclaiming the health benefits of tobacco. (Robbins)

Very scientific, oh yes.

KILL YOUR TV?

Hope this chapter has given you a hint to start reading newspaper and magazine articles a little more critically, and perhaps start watching TV news shows with a slightly different attitude than you had before. Always ask, what are they selling here, and who's selling it? And if you actually follow up on Stauber & Rampton's book and check out some of the other resources below, you might even glimpse the possibility of advancing your life one quantum simply by ceasing to subject your brain to mass media. That's right - no more newspapers, no more TV news, no more Time magazine or People magazine Newsweek. ?

You could actually do that. Just think what you could do with the extra time alone.

Really feel like you need to "relax" or find out "what's going on in the world" for a few hours every day? Think about the news of the past couple of years for a minute. Do you really suppose the major stories that have dominated headlines and TV news have been "what is going on in the world?" Do you actually think there's been nothing going on besides the contrived tech slump, the re-filtered accounts of foreign violence and disaster, the accounts of US retribution in the Middle East, making Afghanistan and Iraq safe for democracy, etc., and all the other non-stories that the puppeteers dangle before us every day? What about when they get a big one, like with OJ or Michael Jackson or the London bombing? Or now with the Rove-Neo-Nazi aftermath of 9/11. Do we really need to know all that detail, day after day? Do we have any way of verifying all that detail, even if we wanted to? What is the purpose of media? To inform the public? Hardly.

The primary purpose of media is to keep the public in a state of fear and uncertaintyso that they'll watch again tomorrow to see how much worse things got. And be subjected to the same advertising.

Oversimplification? Of course. That's the hallmark of mass media mastery - simplicity. The invisible hand. Like Edward Bernays said, the people must be controlled without them knowing it.

Consider this: what was really going on in the world all that time they were distracting us with all that stupid vexatious daily smokescreen? We have no way of knowing. And most of it doesn't even concern us even if we could know it. Fear and uncertainty - that's what keeps people coming back for more.

If this seems like a radical outlook, let's take it one step further:

What would you lose from your life if you stopped watching TV and stopped reading newspapers and glossy magazines altogether?

Whoa!

Would your life really suffer any financial, moral, intellectual, spiritual, or academic loss from such a decision?

Do you really need to have your family continually absorbing the illiterate, amoral, phony, culturally bereft, desperately brainless values of the people featured in the average nightly TV program? Are these fake, programmed robots "normal"?

Do you need to have your life values constantly spoonfed to you?

Are those shows really amusing, or just a necessary distraction to keep you from looking at reality, or trying to figure things out yourself by doing a little independent reading? Or perhaps from actually having a conversation with the people who live in the same house with you?

What else could we be doing with all this freed-up time that would actually expand awareness?

PLANET OF THE APES?

There's no question that as a nation, we're getting dumber year by year. Look at the presidents we've been choosing lately. Ever notice the blatant grammar mistakes so ubiquitous in today's advertising and billboards? Literacy is marginal in most American secondary schools. Three-fourths of California high school seniors can't read well enough to pass their exit exams. ( SJ Mercury ) If you think other parts of the country are smarter, try this one: hand any high school senior a book by Dumas or Jane Austen, and ask them to open to any random page and just read one paragraph out loud. Go ahead, do it. SAT scales are arbitrarily shifted lower and lower to disguise how dumb kids are getting year by year. (ADD: A Designer Disease) At least 1 in 6 have documented "learning disabilities," which are reinforced and rewarded by special treatment and special drugs. Ever hear of anyone failing a grade any more?

Or observe the intellectual level of the average movie which these days may only last one or two weeks in the theatres, especially if it has insufficient explosions, chase scenes, silicone, fake martial arts, and cretinesque dialogue. Doesn't anyone else notice how badly these 30 or 40 "movie stars" we keep seeing over and over in variations of the same few plots must now overact to get their point across to an ever-dimming audience? How they must say their lines louder and slower as time goes by?

Radio? Consider the low mental qualifications of the falsely animated corporate simians they hire as DJs - seems like they're only allowed to have 50 thoughts, which they just repeat at random. The less their education, the better. And at what point did popular music cease to require the study of any musical instrument or theory whatsoever, not to mention lyric? Perhaps we just don't understand this emerging art form, right? The Darwinism of MTV - apes descended from man.

Ever notice how most articles in any of the glossy magazines sound like they were all written by the same guy? And this writer just graduated from junior college? And yet he has all today's correct opinions on social issues, no original ideas, and that shallow, smug, homogenized corporate omniscience, which enables him to assure us that everything is fine

All this is great news for the PR industry - makes their job that much easier. Not only are very few paying attention to the process of conditioning; fewer are capable of understanding it even if somebody explained it to them.

TEA IN THE CAFETERIA

Let's say you're in a crowded cafeteria, and you buy a cup of tea. And as you're about to sit down you see your friend way across the room. So you put the tea down and walk across the room and talk to your friend for a few minutes. Now, coming back to your tea, are you just going to pick it up and drink it? Remember, this is a crowded place and you've just left your tea unattended for several minutes. You've given anybody in that room access to your tea.

Why should your mind be any different? Turning on the TV, or uncritically absorbing mass publications every day - these activities allow access to our minds by "just anyone" - anyone who has an agenda, anyone with the resources to create a public image via popular media. As we've seen above, just because we read something or see something on TV doesn't mean it's true or worth knowing. So the idea here is, like the tea, perhaps the mind is also worth guarding, worth limiting access to it.

This is the only life we get. Time is our total capital. Why waste it allowing our potential, our scope of awareness, our personality, our values to be shaped, crafted, and boxed up according to the whims of the mass panderers? There are many important issues that are crucial to our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being which require time and study. If it's an issue where money is involved, objective data won't be so easy to obtain. Remember, if everybody knows something, that image has been bought and paid for.

Real knowledge takes a little effort, a little excavation down at least one level below what "everybody knows."

It's the land of the brave and the home of the free /Where the less you know the better off you'll be. Warren ZevonDisorder in the House

Today Chairman Waxman asks White House Counsel Fred Fielding to turn over more than 600 pages of documents relating to the activities of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff that are being withheld because they involve internal White House deliberations."

Bruce Springsteen should be very happy. He has the No. 1 album, a possible Grammy for Best Album of the Year for "Magic," an album full of singles and a sold-out concert tour.

Alas, there’s a hitch: Radio will not play "Magic." In fact, sources tell me that Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from "Magic." But it’s OK to play old Springsteen tracks such as "Dancing in the Dark," "Born to Run" and "Born in the USA."

Just no new songs by Springsteen, even though it’s likely many radio listeners already own the album and would like to hear it mixed in with the junk offered on radio.

Why? One theory, says a longtime rock insider, "is that the audience knows those songs. Of course, they’ll never know these songs if no one plays them."

"Magic," by the way, has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release on Oct. 2 and likely will hit the million mark. That’s not a small achievement these days, and one that should be embraced by Clear Channel.

But what a situation: The No. 1 album is not being played on any radio stations, according to Radio & Records, which monitors such things. Nothing. The rock songs aren’t on rock radio, and the two standout "mellow" tracks — "Magic" and "Devil’s Arcade" — aren’t even on "lite" stations.

The singles-kinda hits, "Radio Nowhere" and "Living in the Future" — which would have been hits no questions asked in the '70s, '80s and maybe even the '90s, also are absent from Top 40.

What to do? Columbia Records is said to be readying a remixed version of "The Girls in their Summer Clothes," a poppy Beach Boys-type track that has such a catchy hook fans were singing along to it at live shows before they had the album. Bruce insiders are hopeful that with a push from Sony, "Girls" will triumph.

I’m not so sure.

Clear Channel seems to have sent a clear message to other radio outlets that at age 58, Springsteen simply is too old to be played on rock stations. This completely absurd notion is one of many ways Clear Channel has done more to destroy the music business than downloading over the last 10 years. It’s certainly what’s helped create satellite radio, where Springsteen is a staple and even has his own channel on Sirius.

It’s not just Springsteen. There is no sign at major radio stations of new albums by John Fogerty or Annie Lennox, either. The same stations that should be playing Santana’s new singles with Chad Kroeger or Tina Turner are avoiding them, too.

Like Springsteen, these "older" artists have been relegated to something called Triple A format stations — i.e. either college radio or small artsy stations such as WFUV in the Bronx, N.Y., which are immune from the Clear Channel virus of pre-programming and where the number of plays per song is a fraction of what it is on commercial radio."

If we could magically go forward in time to November, Hillary Clinton would be the 1st female president of the United States. In the most recent Democracy Corps Report from October 21-23, Clinton garners 49% of the vote, Guliani gets 45%, 3% other and 3% unknown. I have a problem with that. Actually, I have several problems with that. Let’s take a look at the recent Presidents.

1989-1993 George H.W. Bush

1993-2001 William J. Clinton

2001-2009 George W. Bush

(2009-2013) Hillary R. Clinton ?????

This clearly shows that if Clinton were to be elected, the office of the Presidency would have been in the hands of 2 families for 24 years. If we broaden our scope to look at the Bush and Clinton influence in the 1st and 2nd Families of the United States (President’s Family and Vice President’s family) we can calculate this:

1981-1989 Vice President George H.W. Bush; Second Lady Barbara Bush

1989-1993 President George H.W. Bush; First Lady Barbara Bush

1993-2001 President William Clinton; First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton

2001-2009 President George W. Bush; First Lady Laura Bush

2009-2017* President Hillary Rodham Clinton; First Gentleman William Clinton

*Hypothetical 2nd term

This is the far more liberal of the two situations, but either way one looks at it, 24 or 36 years for two families to run the country sets a dangerous precedent and is outright irresponsible. By continuing to elect these families into power, voters have endorsed nepotism and “business as usual” politics. How can Clinton claim that she is an “agent of change” when she has been around the Washington political scene working in the Watergate scandal in 1974? As a high powered attorney at Rose Law Firm from 1976-1992? Or as the First Lady of Arkansas for 12 years? Or as a director of Wal-Mart from 1986-1992?

Hillary Clinton is no doubt a very accomplished woman. But there is a common thread underlying all of these accomplishments- her incredible drive to get, by all means necessary, what she wants. I believe that any person who has been involved in politics and law for almost 30 years did not get where they are on principle and virtue alone, multiple campaign finance scandals notwithstanding. Being a good politician by nature means making deals with the devil and flip-flopping to suit one’s own needs- as evidenced in her 2002 vote to authorize force in Iraq, among other things. By electing Clinton, voters would send a clear message that they want politics and politicians as usual. I predict that were Clinton to be elected, her hypothetical tenure as President would be no different than the presidencies of the past 50 years. She does not have the panache, charisma or values necessary to lead America anywhere off of the downward spiral that we have been bent upon following. Once the novelty of the first female president wears off, voters will see that, yet again, they have been tricked by yet another smooth operator on a power trip.

"If an orchestrated attempt by the national media corporations are intent on drowning Ron Paul’s campaign in a sea of lies, treachery, and media spin, then surely they must at least try to conceal their tactics. They have not.

A cursory glance of national polling data will reveal to anyone, even the most diehard supporter of corporate media’s integrity, that the mainstream polls used as statistical proof of Ron Paul’s low chances more often than not do NOT include Ron Paul in the polls."

Oh, NOT INCLUDING HIM in the polls, huh?

Therefore, I will give your "shit polls," all the consideration they are do, MSM!!

How long are Israel and its lobby in Washington going to go on living this ridiculous, transparent lie? How long are they going to hock the world about the Holocaust while acting as Turkey's number two accomplice, number one being the White House, in denying the Armenian genocide? Again, Congress has demonstrated it won't recognize that the Ottoman Empire, Turkey's predecessor, deliberately wiped out about 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-17. Again, the president of the United States has scared Congress off with a big assist from the Anti-Defamation League and other American Jewish "defense" organizations. (Historically, the American Jewish Committee has led the Israel lobby's effort to shut Congress up about the genocide and the Ottoman Empire's culpability.)

This time, the main reason given was American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without Turkey's good will and cooperation, it was argued, the US would not be able to get weapons and equipment to its soldiers in battle. This is obviously a serious concern - but the White House, Israel and the Israel lobby have been hushing up the Armenian genocide for decades, when there were no American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. This is not the real reason.

The real reason is that in war and peace, Turkey is a critical strategic ally and economic partner of the US and Israel, and the US and Israel do not want to risk upsetting this ally, so, with help in Congress from the ADL, AJC and the like, they enforce the lie that there was no Armenian genocide. Or if there was a genocide, it is not clear who was responsible. Or if it is clear that the Ottoman Empire was responsible, it is not clear that Turkey should inherit the guilt.

"This is a matter for historians to decide," goes the Israeli and American Jewish establishment line.

The historians, however, decided a long time ago. More than 125 Holocaust scholars - including Elie Wiesel, the late Raul Hilberg, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen and Yehuda Bauer - have signed ads in The New York Times demanding acknowledgment that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the Armenians.

Wiesel testified in Congress on behalf of such a resolution. The International Association of Genocide Scholars - which is studded with Jewish names - holds the same view as a matter of course.

SOMEWHERE around three reputable historians disagree. They are led by Bernard Lewis, who may be the world's foremost scholar of Islam, but who, among world scholars, is certainly the foremost enthusiast of Turkey.

There are probably fewer historians who doubt the Armenian genocide than there are scientists who doubt evolution. Maybe we should reserve judgment on evolution, too.

A key Jewish argument for continuing this policy of denial is that breaking it would endanger the 20,000 or so Jews of Turkey, whose leaders have warned against crossing their government on this matter. But if Israel and its lobby in Washington really believe this, then they've as much as sentenced the 25,000 Jews in Iran to death, haven't they? Is anyone in the Israeli government or AIPAC suggesting that they lower the volume on Iran for the sake of Iranian Jewry? So the Turkish Jewish community isn't a real reason for denying the Armenian genocide, it's another excuse.

The one and only genuine moral argument for public Jewish denial of the Armenian genocide is the Jewish people's historical debt to Turkey. For 500 years, up through the time of the Nazis, Turkey gave life-saving refuge to Jews running from persecution, and did so in a welcoming spirit.

This historical truth can't be denied, either. And it presents Jews with a heavy moral dilemma. For Jews to recognize the Armenian genocide is an undeniable act of disloyalty to Turkey, to which we owe an unpayable debt of gratitude.

But I don't think it's terminal disloyalty, I don't think it's unforgivable disloyalty. With time, it's not something that can't be made up for with other acts of Jewish or Israeli gratitude.

Denying the Armenian genocide, on the other hand, is an unforgivable, terminal betrayal not only of the Armenians, but of truth, of decency, of the legacy of the Holocaust, of ourselves as Jews, of ourselves as people.

What's more, the Jewish moral debt to Turkey is at best a secondary motive in Israel's and the Israel lobby's campaign of genocide denial. Their overriding concern is Israeli security and economics.

Which, of course, is a 100% legitimate concern. Security and economics are the primary concern of every nation, and Israel is part of the family of nations. But the thing is this: If Israel and the Israel lobby can pursue practical self-interest alone, they can't insist that the rest of the world act like Righteous Gentiles.

They can't go on intoning that "the world stood silent" during the Holocaust when they - the leaders of the Jewish world - act as front-line enforcers of silence on the Armenian genocide.

It's one or the other: morality or realpolitik. As a nation of the world, Israel, along with its lobby in Washington, have always chosen realpolitik. What they may not know, however, is that by now the world sees through them.

The world doesn't take seriously what an Israeli leader or an American Jewish macher has to say about the Six Million, not when it sees that same Israeli leader and American Jewish macher shushing everyone over the murders of 1.5 million other innocents.

Thankfully, those politicians are not the only Jewish voices on the Armenian genocide, or on the Holocaust. There is also Wiesel, Lipstadt, Goldhagen, Bauer, Congressman Adam Schiff, Yossi Sarid and many, many others.

Either you value truth first, or you value power first. Every Jew, every person, makes the choice."

""We must expel Arabs and take their places."-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

"There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"-- Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp. 121-122.

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."-- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99.

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."-- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

"If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel."-- David Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation).

David Ben GurionPrime Minister of Israel1949 - 1954,1955 - 1963"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."-- Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

"Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen."-- Golda Meir, 1961, in a speech to the Knesset, reported in Ner, October 1961

"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy."-- Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971

Golda MeirPrime Minister of Israel1969 - 1974

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."-- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

Yitzhak RabinPrime Minister of Israel1974 - 1977,1992 - 1995

"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."-- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."-- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

Menachem BeginPrime Minister of Israel1977 - 1983

"The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya (=Jewish immigration), and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country."-- Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple."-- Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.

"(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."-- Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

Yizhak ShamirPrime Minister of Israel1983 - 1984,1986 - 1992

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

Benjamin NetanyahuPrime Minister of Israel1996 - 1999"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more"....-- Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force...."-- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000.

"I would have joined a terrorist organization."-- Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha'aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.

Ehud BarakPrime Minister of Israel1999 - 2001

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."-- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 25 March, 2001 quoted in BBC News Online

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Warning: Some commentaries may include profanity. I offer my apologies in advance for those who may be offended by the harsh language in response to outrageous lies.